DPs

Europe's Displaced Persons, 1945–51

Mark Wyman

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780801456039
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Europäische Geschichte

"Wyman has written a highly readable account of the movement of diverse ethnic and cultural groups of Europe's displaced persons, 1945–1951. An analysis of the social, economic, and political circumstances within which relocation, resettlement, and repatriation of millions of people occurred, this study is equally a study in diplomacy, in international relations, and in social history.... A vivid and compassionate recreation of the events and circumstances within which displaced persons found themselves, of the strategies and means by which people survived or did not, and an account of the major powers in response to an unprecedented human crisis mark this as an important book."— Choice

1

A CONTINENT IN RUINS

Europe is on the move. The exiled peoples are going home. The roads are filled with men and women of a score of nations trudging back hundreds of miles. Frequently they pause and rest in the warm sun, for the end of the shooting finds Europe not only injured but very tired.

—The Times (London), 18 May 1945

IN last week of April 1945 a long, slow-moving mass of humanity made its way out of northwest Yugoslavia into Italy. It included many people who had fled their homes with only an hour’s notice, as Tito’s Partisans began closing in following the German retreat and the collapse of home guard forces.

It was a movement typical of those hectic final weeks of World War II across Europe. Most of those fleeing went on foot, so crowded into the narrow roadways that those with bicycles could only walk with them. Some attempted to use wagons pulled by horses or oxen, and German soldiers occasionally traveled in trucks that could proceed only fitfully amid the crowds moving toward Italy.

Near Gorizia they met the British. The encounter came after they crossed the Soca River, which rumor had pointed to as the stopping point of the eastward-pushing Allied troops. Better, then, to cross the Soca. A journalist accompanying the British soldiers reported that they met “a sombre trail of bewildered peoples.” In that mass of humanity were representatives from all Europe—Slovenians and Slovaks, Italians and Rumanians, Frenchmen and Jews. One participant recalled the scene as evening crept over the weary travelers gathered by the military into a dusty open field:

Orthodox priests with long beards were there, waving their hands and getting people together. There was a proliferation of religious groups—with nothing material to have, people were hanging on to religion. Through the smoke of the campfires we heard singing coming from many points of the encampment—Jewish songs, Serbian chants, Frenchmen singing popular numbers. There were violins, fiddles, flutes, clarinets, an accordion.¹

The mood of this congregation of the homeless and dispossessed, fleeing territory torn by the clash of opposing armies, was in sharp contrast with the jubilation erupting elsewhere as word came of the end of the war. Cheering multitudes appeared among the victors—dancing around hastily built bonfires across England, pouring into massive celebrations along Paris’s boulevards, hearing King Christian of Denmark announce in Copenhagen, “We are once again able to raise our ancient flag.” When John Deane arrived at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow the afternoon following the German surrender, he found the city center still celebrating after twelve hours of revelry. The Russians joyfully seized Americans and tossed them like corks on upraised hands above the crowd, giving prolonged cheers to anyone appearing at an embassy window. “The day was cold in Moscow,” Deane wrote, “but my heart was warmed by the spontaneous spirit of friendship being shown by the thousands of Russian people in the square outside my window.”²

In areas left behind by the fleeing refugees, however, the celebrations were mainly confined to Allied bases. No shouts of exhilaration broke the eerie silence of the bombed-out cities, many of which had virtually lost their identities. “Pforzheim doesn’t exist anymore,” a traveler reported incredulously as he entered a familiar area in Germany.³ Cologne’s cathedral could still be viewed from afar, but persons nearing the city center found only a “white sea of rubble, faceless and featureless in the bright sunlight,” like “the sprawling skeleton of a giant animal.” When General Eisenhower visited Berlin he confided to a friend, “It is quite likely, in my opinion, that there will never be any attempt to rebuild Berlin.”⁴ The devastation was as bad to the east, where in addition to Poland’s urban ruin a sixth of the farms were out of operation and three-fourths of the standard railroad trackage was damaged or unusable. Some cities of the Soviet Ukraine had sustained 90 percent destruction; to the north in Byelorussia, Minsk’s 80-percent destruction was comparable to Warsaw’s. In Yugoslavia, too, the land had been laid waste by invasions and bombings in addition to civil war. One heavily contested area of Yugoslavia could show no building still standing along a 125-mile stretch of highway.⁵

Amid this barren countryside that marked much of the continent of Europe, with odors of corpses rotting in bombed basements and washing up along the shores, survivors haltingly began to poke their way.

Military planners tried to prepare for these refugees, since the total of those running from battle zones had been growing long before the climactic final struggles of 1945. This was noted in 1943 when the tide of war changed and the Western powers and their Soviet allies began to push toward Germany from the east, south, and west. A former resident of Gdańsk recalled going shopping one day in 1943 and suddenly encountering a seemingly endless train of horse-drawn wagons and carts moving wearily through the city, filled with refugees escaping the war to the east.⁶ Allied armies advancing up the Italian boot in 1943, and inland from the Normandy beachhead in 1944, faced the problem of handling the massive numbers of refugees they encountered. By August 1944 a center had been set up near Cherbourg to care for some 1,000 mainly non-French refugees, and within two months 50,000 of these—mostly Poles and Russians—were collected at locations across France.

The front had been pushed far enough toward Germany by January 1945 to make way for a hundred assembly centers in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands that housed and fed some 247,000 persons. By then each major Allied advance brought a crescendo of refugees. Soon after Hamburg finally fell in early May of 1945 its 1.5 million population was swollen by some 500,000 of the homeless. Allied officers were instructed to make preparations to care for more than 1 million Allied nationals by war’s end, a third of them liberated prisoners of war from Allied armies, the rest civilians. The eventual totals were far above these predictions.⁷

Most estimates placed almost 7 million civilians on the move in western Europe during the early summer of 1945. Like those the British met at Gorizia, these were fleeing, or heading home, or searching for family members, or simply trying to survive. Another 7 million traveled in the Soviet Union’s areas of control in central and east Europe, while Italy reported at least 95,000, and Norway, 141,000, on the road. Thousands of others escaped being included in the statistics.⁸

There were others who would soon join this slow-moving mass—some 7.8 million German soldiers who were held by the Western Allies at war’s end and another 2 million who were interned by the Soviet Union. These Wehrmacht veterans had often rushed to surrender in the closing weeks, throwing their weapons into piles as they marched by Allied checkpoints. In the British area of control in northern Germany enemy POWS were being released at the rate of 22,000 a day by mid-May. The Allies everywhere found it was too difficult to maintain them for long.⁹

Soldiers to the front, refugees to the rear. U.S. infantrymen near the Erft Canal at Bergheim, Germany, pursue the Germans while liberated French civilians move home again on 4 March 1945. (National Archives photo.)

Occasionally the victors uncovered strange groups within the Wehrmacht, 15 to 20 percent of whose forces were non-German. Guarding the passes in the Austrian Alps were thousands of Cossacks, bitterly anti-Communist, who had joined the German cause during the occupation of the Ukraine. A Times (London) reporter who happened upon one group of 24,000 Cossack men, women, and children, moving along the Gail River toward Oberdrauburg and Lienz, described the scenes as “no different in any major detail from what an artist might have painted in the Napoleonic wars.” Here were peasants with horses and wooden wagons, “like a convoy of prairie schooners trekking onwards.” It had taken them nearly a year to travel to northern Italy from their beloved country of the Don; now, bewildered and apprehensive, they joined the new lost army of the road in liberated Europe.¹⁰

This conglomeration of moving humanity—Cossacks and French, Serbs and Belgians, Silesians and Ukrainians—provided scenes of chaos in the spring of 1945 that few participants will ever forget. One family journeyed across the Rhineland on a camel “liberated” from a German zoo. A Croatian general fleeing from Zagreb in the final days recalled that “so thickly packed together were wagons, tanks, oxcarts, carriages, automobiles, trucks, and vans of all descriptions that at many points no ground could be discerned between them.” It was a mass migration like that of the Ostrogoths some 1,500 years earlier, he said. Women, children, old people, and all kinds of animals mingled with Croatian, German, White Russian, and Albanian troops. A journalist watched this human flotsam that seemed to move in all directions:

Here is an emaciated man in striped pyjama clothing, plodding down the road to Aschaffenburg, a poignant reminder of the horrors behind the beautiful facade of the countryside. Then some parties of men and women pushing a piled-up hand-cart bearing a Luxembourg flag…. The French pass in American lorries, the Tricolor fluttering bravely beside the United States driver, the sides garlanded with branches plucked from the roadside, the men and women seeming too dazed to display their native vivacity.¹¹

Others worried over the refugees’ future when they compared the kilometers still to be traveled with the physical condition of the travelers. And all the while overworked, underfed oxen and horses strained to pull decrepit wagons and carts. A New York Times reporter was present when a horse collapsed and fell to the side of the clogged roadway, where its owner quickly removed the harness and cut its throat; immediately “a swarm of people, all with murderous looking knives, appeared and cut off hunks of meat for their next meal” while the animal still lived. The horse “was a near skeleton with his head untouched” in less than an hour.¹²

Despite their handicaps, the bulk of the Western European refugees moved quickly to their former homes. Of the 1.2 million French found in Germany at the surrender, for example, only 40,550 remained by 18 June. The Western Allies reported that 3.2 million refugees had found their way home by 2 July, mainly to the USSR, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands; many were sped on their way in Allied trucks and airplanes.¹³

But just as the crowds on the roadways of Germany began to show signs of thinning in late summer, a new group of refugees appeared—the ethnic Germans or Volksdeutschen who had resided as their ancestors had in areas of Poland or other central European countries now freed of Nazi control, or who lived in regions of Germany transferred to Polish sovereignty by the Potsdam Agreement. Perhaps 12 million of these “expellees,” as they were sometimes called, entered Germany in the two years immediately following the war.¹⁴ In a single week some 200,000 arrived in Berlin, many with tales of having received thirty minutes’ warning before their forced departure, or of Gdańsk evictions being carried out street by street.¹⁵

The Volksdeutschen could call on other Germans to look after them. That was a crucial difference, for although there were enormous strains in this situation these refugees were, in the end, settled among their own people, speaking their own language. Most of the German prisoners of war were also able to leave the fenced-in detention centers soon after the war and return to their old neighborhoods and to sympathetic countrymen. This was true as well for many of the foreign laborers, especially the Dutch, Belgians, French, Norwegians, Danes, and Italians. Confidently, Allied planners looked forward to rebuilding Europe without the refugees in the way.

But this was not to be. As the masses moved along the roads, observers reported that some groups were not rushing home. They were, in fact, heading in other directions. A reporter watching the exhuberant Western Europeans pass along the highway in throngs noted that “a sadder sight is presented by the Poles.” In contrast with the others, the Polish current “sets toward the West” instead of toward Poland, he wrote. “The problem of their repatriation is more complicated than that of the Belgians and Dutch, or even of the Italians, who with the Russians make up the balance of this human flotsam.”¹⁶

Where did they come from? What twisting paths of war had decreed that these people would end up “displaced” after V-E day? The first steps along that pathway often came very early, even ahead of the blitzkrieg attacks that plummeted Europe into war.

Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933 set off an ever-mounting exodus of Jews, of his political and economic opponents, and of others who were under increasing pressure from the Nazis. Some 17,000 German Jews and 8,000 Austrian Jews found refuge in Britain during the war, part of the total of over 114,000 refugees residing there for most of the duration. Ninety percent of the 55,000 refugees in Switzerland in early 1945 were Jewish. One group of Jews made it to Shanghai, China; 10,000 of these were allowed to cross the Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, where they waited out the European war while being drawn into the Far Eastern conflict. Some 400,000 Jews had fled from Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland by May 1939. A total of 63,000 emigrated to the United States and 55,000, to Palestine; the rest scattered over the globe—many to other European countries where they were again caught by the Third Reich.

Their tragedy became apparent as the Allies probed into the reality of the Third Reich. Some five hundred concentration camps and satellite work camps were soon uncovered, and later estimates put the human totals held in them during some part of the Nazi years at 6.6 million. The Konzentrationslager was often a death camp; 6 million of the inmates were killed or died, three-fourths of them Jews.

The story of the concentration camps has been told often, and in grisly detail, but it must be noted here because of the camps’ longterm impact—if only (in Malcolm Proudfoot’s words) “because terror of these camps was a part of the grim background of every displaced person in Hitler’s Europe,” and care of the camps’ survivors became one of the most important tasks facing the conquerors.¹⁷

The numbers killed by direct or indirect causes in the concentration and extermination camps are still only capable of estimate. And there were “other holocausts” as well that brought death to millions of others, Jews and non-Jews, outside of combat. What is not debated on the realistic level is the existence of horror the world had never before known—the piles of hair, eyeglasses, and shoes found by the invading armies; the mass graves and sta...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to the Cornell edition
• 1 A Continent in Ruins
• 2 Into the Camps
• 3 Repatriation
• 4 Displaced Children
• 5 Camps Become Communities
• 6 Jews of the Surviving Remnant
• 7 Cultures in Exile
• 8 The Gates Open
• 9 Legacies
• Notes
• Bibliography